AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs Fabio: What are the differences?

What is AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)? Automatically distribute your incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. With Elastic Load Balancing, you can add and remove EC2 instances as your needs change without disrupting the overall flow of information. If one EC2 instance fails, Elastic Load Balancing automatically reroutes the traffic to the remaining running EC2 instances. If the failed EC2 instance is restored, Elastic Load Balancing restores the traffic to that instance. Elastic Load Balancing offers clients a single point of contact, and it can also serve as the first line of defense against attacks on your network. You can offload the work of encryption and decryption to Elastic Load Balancing, so your servers can focus on their main task.

What is Fabio? *HTTP and TCP reverse proxy *. It is an HTTP and TCP reverse proxy that configures itself with data from Consul Traditional load balancers and reverse proxies need to be configured with a config file. The configuration contains the hostnames and paths the proxy is forwarding to upstream services. This process can be automated with tools like consul-template that generate config files and trigger a reload..

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Fabio can be categorized as "Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy" tools.

Some of the features offered by AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) are:

• Distribution of requests to Amazon EC2 instances (servers) in multiple Availability Zones so that the risk of overloading one single instance is minimized. And if an entire Availability Zone goes offline, Elastic Load Balancing routes traffic to instances in other Availability Zones.
• Continuous monitoring of the health of Amazon EC2 instances registered with the load balancer so that requests are sent only to the healthy instances. If an instance becomes unhealthy, Elastic Load Balancing stops sending traffic to that instance and spreads the load across the remaining healthy instances.
• Support for end-to-end traffic encryption on those networks that use secure (HTTPS/SSL) connections.

On the other hand, Fabio provides the following key features:

• HTTP and TCP reverse proxy
• Configures itself with data from Consul
• TLS termination with dynamic certificate stores

Fabio is an open source tool with 6.38K GitHub stars and 557 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Fabio's open source repository on GitHub.